Belgian Police Arrest Six on Charges of Recruiting for Syrian Insurgency

By JAMES KANTER and RICK GLADSTONE; James Kanter reported from Brussels, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Published: April 17, 2013

Syria, where an increasingly international array of rebels is fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

The raids, the result of an investigation that began last year, reflected Syria’s growing allure to militant Islamist fighters who see Syria as a prime battleground. The foreign jihadist element in the insurgency has alarmed Western powers that want to see Mr. Assad step down but do not want him replaced by an Islamist militant government or stateless mayhem.">

BRUSSELS — The authorities in Belgium raided 48 homes nationwide on Tuesday and detained six men implicated in what prosecutors described as a jihadist recruitment drive for the insurgency in Syria, where an increasingly international array of rebels is fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

The raids, the result of an investigation that began last year, reflected Syria’s growing allure to militant Islamist fighters who see Syria as a prime battleground. The foreign jihadist element in the insurgency has alarmed Western powers that want to see Mr. Assad step down but do not want him replaced by an Islamist militant government or stateless mayhem.

Some of the most fearless jihadist groups in Syria have foreign fighters, most notably the Nusra Front, which last week publicly confirmed its alliance with Al Qaeda’s Iraqi branch and pledged fealty to the Qaeda leadership.

The Belgian authorities said their investigation focused on a group known as Sharia4Belgium and whether it constitutes a terrorist group. The prosecutor’s office said in a statement that it was aware of 33 people apparently with links to the group from Antwerp and Vilvoorde, a community north of Brussels, who were either in Syria or en route.

Most foreign jihadists in Syria are believed to come from Turkey, Jordan and Iraq, as well as from the Sahel region of northern Africa. According to the International Center for the Study of Radicalization, a partnership of academic institutions based in London, 140 to 600 Europeans have gone to Syria since early 2011, representing 7 percent to 11 percent of the total number of foreign fighters.

The police raids were in cities that included Antwerp and Brussels and in a number of smaller towns and suburbs in an operation involving 225 officers, the statement by the prosecutor’s office said. They seized cellphones, money and computers.

The investigation showed that recruitments were carried out by directly contacting youths in the street and inviting them to private meeting places in Antwerp, according to the statement.

“The prosecutor’s office regards it as important to attack the structures and the groups that allow young Belgians to go to Syria,” the statement said, adding that the main concern was youths who had Jihadist ideologies rather than those who wanted to help create a democratic Syria.

Such youths could return to Belgium with expertise in weapons and explosives that they could use in Europe, the office said. That could also “continue their radicalization here and then export their extremist ideas.”

Word of the raids came as the outlook for the two-year-old conflict in Syria seemed only to darken. Mr. Assad announced what the official news agency, SANA, described as a general amnesty on crimes committed before Tuesday, ahead of the country’s independence day, but said “crimes of treason, espionage and terrorism were excluded.”

Mr. Assad’s opponents described his decree as a theatrical and meaningless gesture. “This is not the first amnesty,” said Rima Fleihan, a member of the National Coalition of Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, the main political opposition group, reached by telephone in Amman, Jordan. “Several amnesties preceded this one, and they were not serious in releasing political detainees.”

In a possible indication of a new mass killing in Syria, activist groups reported the discovery of at least 31 bodies in a suburb of Aleppo, the northern city that has been a battleground since July. The Local Coordination Committees, an anti-Assad organization in Syria, said some bodies had been burned and at least three were handcuffed.

Earlier Tuesday, five United Nations relief agencies released an open letter calling for an intensified international effort to end the conflict in Syria.

The agencies coupled their appeal with an implicit warning that they would soon be forced to drastically reduce their work in the country.

More than 70,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began as a peaceful political uprising in March 2011. The United Nations has been coordinating an effort that has provided help to more than 5.5 million people in Syria and neighboring countries.

“The needs are growing while our capacity to do more is diminishing, due to security and other practical limitations within Syria as well as funding constraints,” said the letter, released in print and video format on the Internet by the top executives of the five agencies, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the High Commissioner for Refugees, the World Food Program, the World Health Organization and Unicef.

“We are precariously close, perhaps within weeks, to suspending some humanitarian support,” the letter said.

Syria, where an increasingly international array of rebels is fighting to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

The raids, the result of an investigation that began last year, reflected Syria’s growing allure to militant Islamist fighters who see Syria as a prime battleground. The foreign jihadist element in the insurgency has alarmed Western powers that want to see Mr. Assad step down but do not want him replaced by an Islamist militant government or stateless mayhem.">